Country Girl: A Memoir

(Winner of the 2012 Irish Book Award for Nonfiction, and one of the New York Times Notable Books of 2013 )When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized her family's local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred, and has since created a body of work that has earned the James Joyce Ulysses Medal and the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award—a triumph born uneasily out of a life of high drama and contemplation, as she relates in this irresistible memoir. "Ms. O'Brien has long and correctly been recognized as among the greatest Irish writers of the 20th century," wrote Dwight Garner in the New York Times. "She's had an outsize life to match her outsize talent. It was filled, she writes, with 'the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter'."

"The past surges and eddies throughout [this memoir], with a logic and texture of its own. Its author remains beguiling and brave, as lucid as ever about the rapturous lows and the punishing highs. Her eye is pitiless and her prose sumptuous. Long before that quayside discovery, her religion has been literature; to it she has remained devout, with a fervor that is contagious.... She is no saint. She is an icon."—NYTBR